Phindile attends primary school in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. She is 11 years old and dreams of becoming an actress. Phindile was seen by an ICEE optometrist who visited Acacia Primary as part of the Giving Sight to Africa programme.“The sad part is that she sat the whole year not knowing she had defective vision,” said Mr Jacob, Phindile’s grade 7 teacher.
Phindile was mildly hyperopic, which meant she struggled with reading. However, her distance vision was also causing her problems, because she was unable to see the chalk board. ICEE was able to supply Phindile with the pair of glasses she needed to correct her vision problem and she improved tremendously. “Fortunately ICEE came along and everything took off from there for her,” said Mr Jacob.
Acacia Primary is situated in a low social-economic area that greatly benefits from programmes like Giving Sight to KwaZulu-Natal. “It is an exceptionally excellent programme, especially in an environment like ours, where the larger community cannot even afford to live… but the ICEE coming here to them, it certainly helped,” said Mr Jacob.
ICEE Optometrist Sabera reflects on the importance of the ICEE programme by saying, “It touches the heart. You get there and the kids haven’t had an eye test ever. The testing is being done at the right time because this is where the development occurs. The right stage to pick it up is primary school levels – so it is perfect.”
Phindile was having difficulty and the doctor was unable to diagnose the problem. She said, “I didn’t see very well. I went to the doctor - the doctor said another thing… and I didn’t know what to believe.”
Because of her vision difficulties Phindile was struggling at school. Now that she has a new pair of glasses things have changed, “the teachers won’t scream at me and say ‘you are repeating the words’,” she said.
Mr Jacob has noticed that a pair of glasses has resulted in improvements in Phindile’s school work and made remarkable change in her behaviour, “now that Phindile has glasses she is showing a lot of confidence and she is a lot happier,” he said.
‘It looks beautiful and everything has changed…feels great,” said Phindile.
